In July, two Texas school districts received what amounted to notices of execution: letters from the state education commissioner saying that the Texas Education Agency was shutting them down.

The reason? Years of poor academics and financial mismanagement. The result? Their students — and their tax dollars — would go to neighboring districts, which many residents feared would have a cataclysmic effect on local communities.

It’s rare for the state to revoke the accreditation of an entire school district. Since 1995, it has only happened four times. The two districts marked for closure last summer, Premont ISD in South Texas and ...

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Comments (4)

Failing schools need help in the form of financial resources, experienced teachers, increased support personnel and special academic programs. There is no evidence to show that shutting down a school will improve student achievement.

That's the real "Texas Miracle" under Perry: have failing state education system, take billions a year in federal aid dollars, siphon that to shore up budget shortfalls elsewhere, AND still have no shame in saying "Washington keep your hands off us and our education system."

they should be closed and we should do away with public schools and pass out vouchers for the choice of the parents to make the best choice for there child. Plus this would stop all aid to illegal aliens and there children. Then our children would have more tax money to use toward vouchers. Turn the public schools into private make them preform or they will lose there jobs and go out of business. This will be a win win for all who truely cares about educating our children. Instead of union control teachers that march to the tune of the unions this should be nation wide. Best thing do away with federal Government total out of the schooling. Let parents and teachers work out the schooling for the children. Anyone BUT the fraud and traitor Obama and democrats!

April 5, 2012 @ 3 p.m.

Jim Vance

@gypsy314 ne -- Just where are you from, originally? Is that "ne" in your tag reflective of Nebraska, New England or just somewhere "non-Earthly"? I certainly don't believe you're a Texas native (as I am), and while your ilk might now be in the majority from this state's inmigrants (legal or otherwise) over the past half-century-plus since I was born, your ranting spout is nothing but bloviated neofascist crap.

There is no shortage of problems faced by the public school system in Texas and most other states, both financial and in a wide array of complex social and institutional aspects. Only some of those are of any individual school's or school district's own making -- many have roots which lay outside their control or are intrinsically embedded by design in their very existence by Legislative intent. Most prominently among the latter category is the hypocritical management structure granted (or imposed) by State Constitutional fiat associated with "independent" status which traditionally provides each and every district within the state's boundaries near-complete autonomy in decisions (by its locally-elected board) associated with physical infrastructure, personnel, and property tax rate (at least until recently, when some constraining parameters became imposed). Such autonomy and independence has (by design and intent) long enabled a maximum degree of self-determination cherished by many liberal- AND conservative-minded folk under the rubric of "local control".

In theory, perhaps -- in practice, the structure has enabled, fostered and fed a widespread propensity over the past century for highly disparate allocation of district resources among its schools serving different geographic areas (inner-city versus fringe or suburban in most larger and medium-sized districts) and ethnic population groups, regardless of court-ordered efforts to desegregate the country's public school systems during the mid-1950's in order to correct and mitigate the legacy of slavery which had existed in Texas and elsewhere since the Civil War had ended. What transpired instead was the well-known "white flight" to the suburbs where postwar development construction booms in housing, schools and roads in rural and fringe areas of most Texas cities solidified and reinforced a "build it and they will come" practice among local insiders that began when oil tax revenues began flowing into the dedicated funds for highway and educational systems during the 1920's. Those large revenue streams not only created a world-class highway network and high-quality school system for a few decades, but also made many of those well-connected local insiders who could favorably influence highway and school siting decisions quite wealthy. One truly serious problem which besets this entire State is that those institutional actors and forces now exert major influence and use their political power to continue the same induced-development game as in the last half-century while attempting to sustain the longstanding gravy train they've enjoyed.

Yet all independent public school districts and schools within those jurisdictions have always been and still are strictly regulated by the State through mandatory operational requirements of various types, notably a common and uniform curricula utilizing textbooks for each of the courses at every primary and secondary grade level throughout every district within the entire State, plus of course the exit tests which every student must now pass in order to advance or graduate. The approach may be well-intended to establish a common educational threshold in order to promote and raise some minimum level of general capabilities for children as they pass through adolescence and become contributing adult members (hopefully positive ones) of a broader society, but such a "one-size-must-fit-all" principle does not work well for everyone, in fact for less and less of the majority under any sort of bell curve distribution no matter what parameter is examined. This seems particularly true in the past few decades with the imposition of ever-more radical notions imposed from the SBOE as a large amount of those continuing induced-development profits accrued by wealthy insiders have repeatedly been plowed into the electoral campaigns of candidates whose beliefs lie somewhere far into an extreme tail of the political spectrum which it appears you share.